RACIAL TENSIONS PERSIST IN CROWN HEIGHTS

By LYDIA CHAVEZ

Published: April 10, 1987

About 1:30 A.M. on Feb. 26, someone placed a cardboard orange-juice box and a can containing petroleum in the basement of Willie Mae Reddish's house in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and set them afire, according to the police.

Mrs. Reddish, a black woman, fled the fire with her mother and three sons. As the family ran, Mrs. Reddish said, she heard someone chanting, ''Burn, burn, burn.''

A witness saw two men, one dressed in a long black coat and fedora and the other in a blue coat, run from behind the Reddish house to the basement area of a dormitory for Hasidic Jews at a nearby yeshiva, according to police reports. The authorities said they doubted the men would be caught because no one had seen their faces.

An administrator at the Lubavitcher Yeshiva, Joseph Kazen, said any allegations against the students living in the dormitory were ''based on untrue facts.''

Mr. Kazen, expressing a view that was not widely shared, said racial tension did not exist in Crown Heights.

No matter who may have committed the firebombing, the event has proved another source of tension in a community where memories of racial violence of the mid-70's are still fresh.

Crown Heights, just east of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, is a neighborhood of broad, tree-lined streets, neat three-story houses and small-scale apartment buildings. It is also a community divided by race, religion and culture. Blacks and Hasidim feel threatened by one another, and racial tensions have festered in the area for some time.

The ill ease between the two groups has several sources.

Blacks and Hasidim compete for housing. Although longtime black residents said they had been harassed to move, many Hasidim argued that there was no such effort.

The Hasidim control a private security force that some blacks perceive as antagonistic to them. But the religious group argues that they are the targets of crime and that the patrol is necessary.

Other topics of dispute are the control of community organizations and the disburse ment of community development funds, which, public records show, go disproportionately to whites in the predominantly black neighborhood.

The communities are like two foreign countries sharing the same crowded terrain. The lines are sharply drawn. The public schools are largely black, and the communities do not generally mix socially. As in most neighborhood conflicts, the vast majority of people in Crown Heights just want to live in peace. But despite the sentiment, many positions are in opposition.

Some blacks said they felt excluded and denigrated.

By and large, many white residents said, they thought the racial tension had been exaggerated by outsiders and exacerbated by some local black officials.

Blacks and Hasidim, according to the head of Community Planning Board 9, Rabbi Jacob Goldstein, get along. However, he added:

''The Hasidic community doesn't interact with the black community. Our kids don't go to public schools.''

Representative Major Owens, Democrat of Brooklyn, disagreed about the relationship.

''Although no one is openly advocating violence,'' he said, ''we have a situation that could easly explode. There are some Rambo types on both sides.'' Diverse Groups, Small Area All but three of the several stores along a commercial strip of Kingston Avenue are run by Hasidim, and their customers are largely Jewish. Similarly, most of the shops on Nostrand and Utica Avenues are operated by blacks, and blacks tend to shop in them.

Of the 96,892 residents in the neighborhood, 78 percent are black, 9.3 percent white, 9.5 percent Hispanic and 1.2 percent Asian, according to the 1980 Census.

The majority of whites are Hasidim who belong to the Lubavitcher community. After an outbreak of racial violence in the 70's, many whites fled. But the Lubavitchers, who have their world headquarters on Eastern Parkway, remained and grew somewhat.

Blacks and whites have large families and similar family incomes: $13,087 a year for blacks and $12,768 for whites, according to the 1980 Census. The median family income in Brooklyn is $14,664. The Pressure Builds To Find Housing In a section where large families are the norm, real estate is in great demand. Many of the most sought after blocks - such as on President, Carroll and Union Streets - are lined with large homes owned by longtime black residents.

Blacks complain that the Hasidic groups, in their need to expand, try so aggressively to purchase black-owned homes and churches that the efforts amount to harrassment.

''We get requests - on occasion there are circulars and telephone calls - and it gets annoying,'' said Wilbur LaBorde, a black resident who added that the requests to sell were always from Hasidim. ''The mother of one of my neighbors died, and before she could bury her mother, she was getting requests to sell her home. It is the height of insensitivity.''

Last spring, Mr. LaBorde wrote a letter complaining about the calls and quickly received a letter from the Lubavitcher leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. Rabbi Schneerson offered to meet with him, but Mr. LaBorde dropped the issue because, he said, he was busy with other things.

None of the Hasidic leaders interviewed, however, said they knew of any concerted effort to displace blacks.